


a realization, a promise

by malevon



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Comfort, F/M, me being sad about divine pulse again, no beta we die like Glenn, very minor descriptions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:15:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22595392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malevon/pseuds/malevon
Summary: byleth tells claude about divine pulse. he has questions, and she... tries to have answers.
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 7
Kudos: 149





	a realization, a promise

_ You’re much too young to have seen so much death,  _ Sothis tells her one night, unprompted.  _ For this, I am sorry. _

**

When Byleth first tells Claude about her goddess-given ability to turn back time one night on the roof of the Goddess Tower, their usual meet-up spot for stargazing and pondering and conversing, he is silent for a long, long time. She doesn’t know why she told him. They could have finished out this war with him never knowing, with him just accepting that sometimes she would come off the battlefield with rampant nosebleeds and nausea from overusing it. She knew he could never quite just accept that. She always chalked it up to magic overuse, but Claude was smarter than that - he knew Byleth didn’t use magic unless absolutely necessary, much preferring the feeling of a blade in her hands. 

So she told him. She told him, and he hasn’t said anything in response yet, and it’s making her uneasy.

“Claude?” she starts, sitting up and looking down at him. He has what would look like a blank gaze to anyone not familiar with him, but she can physically see the gears turning in his head, as if his eyes were simply windows into the intricate mechniations of his scheming brain. “Don’t overthink this,” she requests, knowing fully well that she can’t stop him from doing any such thing. “It’s fine.”

“How much have you changed?” he asks, looking at her in earnest. That wasn’t the first question Byleth expected him to have, and she makes to answer, but he continues: “How much  _ can _ you change?”

The question, obviously, goes much deeper than what shows on the surface, but Byleth continues to be honest with him, just as she always has. “I can only go back a few moments. Only a few moments, but… they’ve been key in some of the recent battles.” She’s not immune to the feeling of guilt; she’s torn herself apart some nights, thinking about how the situation is sometimes so dire that she has to just throw her students around carelessly to see what works, if anything works. So far, everything  _ has  _ worked, at the very, very low cost of some of her self-confidence. 

“So I take it you can’t just go back in time and kill Edelgard before this all started, huh?” Claude laughs, and it’s just like him to make a joke out of things, she thinks, but she also knows that everything Claude masks with a laugh and a smile always hides some sort of truth. She shakes her head no. He hums in response, and is silent again.

Byleth turns out to the view of the monastery, the same view she has greeted him by just a scant few months ago. She remembers the first moment she had realized that five years had passed - she had tested the very limits of her power, and without Sothis there to rein her in, Byleth very nearly tore herself apart trying to wind back the clock enough to avoid the cliff, avoid her comatose state that had taken so much from all the people she cared about. 

Claude’s silence is so deafening that she briefly considers winding back the clock to before she told him, but he, blessedly, speaks again before she can do anything rash.

“Have you ever seen anyone die, Teach?”

Yes.

Over and over again, ripping her chest open, the tears not even having a chance to fall before she ripped up temporal seams. 

When the mercenary snuck up behind Marianne while she was trying to heal wounded soldiers, when she watched Raphael and Ignatz disappear into a Bolganone, when Lysithea overworked her magic and collapsed and wouldn’t be roused, when Hilda had ultimately lost a test of strength against a brawler, when Claude had, again and again and again, fallen from his wyvern, been shot down, flown in too headstrong, taken a poison dagger in his side and kept it hidden from the rest of them until it was almost too late.

“A few times, yes.” 

He sits up now, leaning a bit of his weight against her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

It’s perhaps the most genuine thing she’s ever heard him say, and he’s said a lot of genuine things to her since they had reunited. His voice is heavy with realization and, as much as he can feel, empathy. Before she can lie and say that it’s fine, she’s okay, she definitely doesn’t relive the worse timelines in her dreams that kick her out of her quarters and force her to the place they sit now, he asks another question.

“Have  _ you _ ever died?”

**

An arrow, of all things.

Not a blade, or an axe; she would have preferred a blast of magic, if only it wasn’t an arrow. Archers were cunning, and her father had always called them cowards.

Byleth glances down at the wooden shaft protruding from her chest. In the moment, she admires its fletching. The feathers are a royal, deep crimson. They’re beautiful.

She falls to her knees, raising her hands so that her fingers delicately land on the plumage. She should take it out. Should she, with the location of the wound? So close to her chest, she could bleed out faster, her heart - would it matter if she took it out? She doesn’t have a heart, she knows that now, can she still - how does this work -

“ _ Teach!” _

Oh. Oh, no. This is bad. If Claude’s as worried as he sounds, as worried as he looks before her, kneeling in front of her with his hands on her shoulders, his eyes trained on her chest but dancing between the arrow and her eyes, then maybe she should -

She tries to wind back time. Has it always been this difficult? Surely it hasn’t. Claude’s practically yelling in her ear over the din of battle, throwing his head over his shoulder and yelling that way, too. He’s making it incredibly difficult to focus, but then again, so is the creeping darkness at the edges of her vision.

Byleth is only marginally snapped back into clarity when Claude’s hands  _ grip _ either side of her face. His eyes are burning, watering, and he is saying words to her, words so loud she cannot hear them. Her eyes are dangerously close to lolling shut. 

As she is about to let go, too drained to wind back time like she should, too laden with guilt and sorrow and  _ pain _ to even think about trying it again, she feels an agonizingly desperate pressure around her middle, and she’s being pressed into something, there’s pressure  _ everywhere,  _ it’s holding her in, holding her together.

“Please,” a voice whispers in her ear. She can hear it so clearly. “I can’t do this without you. Please.”

She breathes. In, and out, and in again, and out again, and the world drifts.

She breathes in again. 

**

Byleth has never died before. 

It’s such a simple fact, and so obvious; of course she hasn’t died, else she wouldn’t be where she is here, now. She almost voices this, almost admonishes Claude for not being logical, but thinks it callous.

“I’ve come close,” she answers. It feels strange to admit that. She wasn’t supposed to be the one in danger. She was the fixer, the mender, she hasn’t ever been the thing needing fixing, but…

“But you - you all have always saved me.”

Claude looks at her again, his eyes burning.

He leans his head on her shoulder. Byleth, in turn, leans her head on his, and they look out onto the breathtaking view of the monastery from above. In the distance, mountains peeked up over the horizon, silhouetted by the slowly rising red sun. Claude is silent again, for a long period of time, but Byleth is comfortable with this silence. It feels like acceptance, it feels like understanding, it feels like what she thinks having a heart feels like. 

“I’ll try to make sure you won’t have to use it as much anymore, then.” His voice is quiet from beneath her, and it is quiet with conviction, the same conviction she hears in his intonation when he talks of his dreams. She nods, and as the sunrise creeps over the mountaintops in the distance, her fingers slowly creep into his. It is a promise sealed.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> this was so refreshing to write. i haven't written for pleasure in months, but i recently picked up 3h again after having put it down in september, and the words just kept flowing. i hope im still in touch enough with their characters for it to be enjoyable, but ill admit a lot of this was pure self-indulgence.
> 
> thanks for reading!!


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